Red Joan (7 page)

‘There you are.' He looks up, taking off his overcoat to reveal his usual courtroom attire of black suit and smart black shoes. ‘Are you okay? I've just had the strangest phone call.'

Joan feels her heart cramp. He knows! ‘Oh?' she says, trying to make her voice light, as if she could not possibly know what he is going to say next.

‘It was Keith, one of the solicitors at the Crown Prosecution Service. He heard a rumour.' He stops and runs his hand through his hair. He is jumpy and agitated. ‘I'm sorry. I shouldn't even be telling you this. I just wanted to warn you in case anyone came round. I wouldn't want you to be shocked.'

Joan looks down at her feet. She wants to be downstairs, on solid ground, not hovering at the top of the stairs. She grasps the bannister, and descends slowly, deliberately, while her son continues to talk.

‘It's probably just a case of mistaken identity but we need to get it cleared up. This rumour, I mean. And then we might even have a case for libel, depending on how far it's gone. But we'll think about that later. It may be easier to drop it.'

At the bottom of the stairs Joan hesitates, reaching out to put her arms around her son. She wants to feel the warmth of him, the strength of him. She doesn't know what to say. She wonders what she would say if she didn't already know. What would be the convincing thing to do? She crinkles her forehead as if confused. ‘What rumour?' she whispers.

‘It's ridiculous.' He bends to take off his shoes, just as she always made him do when he was a boy.

Joan turns away from him and starts to walk towards the kitchen. How does this Keith fellow know anything? They said they weren't going to tell anyone. Not yet.

The kettle, she thinks. She must fill the kettle. And then she must make toast. She needs to settle her stomach.

He follows her to the kitchen in paisley-patterned socks where Joan's three potted geraniums remain untouched next to the ashtray bearing the charred remains of the solicitor's letter and William's obituary. She picks up the plant pots and moves them to the windowsill, placing them in a neat line, and then she tips the blackened pieces of paper from the ashtray into the bin. ‘He said they've found two old Soviet spies. They started questioning the first one last week, but he died rather suddenly. Probably suicide, Keith said, but it's impossible to force an autopsy when there's no actual proof of any wrongdoing. Or no admissible proof.'

She takes a cloth and wipes the soil and ash from the table. There is mud on the floor too but she cannot think about that now. Her hands shake as she takes the butter out of the fridge. She does not want to think about William. She knows she has never mentioned their connection to Nick, even though he had become quite a public figure in the last few decades and Nick would have been interested. There is no reason for Nick to suspect that she might have any connection with him.

‘Of course, they asked his brother to authorise an autopsy but he refused. The families generally do. Said he should be allowed to rest in peace. So that's why . . . '

Joan blocks Nick's voice out of her head and turns on the grill. She has never got the hang of that toaster. Why have a toaster when you have a grill anyway?

‘Mum, are you listening? The Home Office is preparing a case against the second spy now. They're hoping this will prove their suspicions about the first one—the one who died—so they can get their autopsy.'

Jam. A knife. Fill the kettle. Teabags in the teapot.

‘I know it's ridiculous,' Nick continues. ‘He said he couldn't really tell me anything, but he said your name had come up. Linked to your war work, when you were a secretary.'

Slice the bread. Be firm and decisive. Lay it on the rack. Don't turn around. Don't let him see.

‘Mum, are you listening?'

Slide the bread under the grill. That smell. How she would miss that smell if . . .

She feels Nick's hand on her shoulder. Her body is being turned away from the grill, slowly, slowly, until she is facing her son. The water in the kettle is bubbling furiously and her hands shake as he takes hold of them and squeezes them tightly together.

‘Mum,' he says. ‘They think it's you.'

There is a silence. For a brief moment, Joan is reminded of Nick as a seven-year-old boy, marching home from school to announce the incredible piece of information he had heard that day of where babies came from. She remembers the look of horror on his face as Joan verified that yes, this was indeed true, and she also remembers the terrible feeling this revelation aroused in her because it meant that the time had come. They had agreed that they would never lie to him about where he came from, that they would tell him as soon as he asked. So when Nick pressed his finger against Joan's stomach and asked if he came from in there, Joan had known that she would have to take her little boy onto her knee and hug him tightly, and tell him that there was another mummy out there who loved him very much, but that other mummy had been too young to keep him, and so they had chosen him, chosen him above all others, because as soon as they had seen him they had known he was the most perfect thing they had ever seen.

Joan remembers Nick's small face, open-mouthed and furrowed, as he took in this piece of information. And she remembers the phone call from school the following morning requesting her to come and collect him because he had punched a boy in the face and would not say sorry. She had held Nick while he cried, until finally he confessed that he had punched the boy for laughing at him because he didn't have a real mother.

Joan had regretted telling him then, thinking that perhaps they should have waited until he was eighteen as advised by the adoption agency, although this had seemed deceitful somehow. She had wondered if there might have been a gentler way of phrasing it, if her husband would have done it better. She does not know. Perhaps. But whenever she does think of this moment, there is always one aspect of it she remembers with absolute clarity: that last gasp of innocence as Nick's finger was pressed into her stomach, his face questioning, and the breath of time just before she answered the question, when it was still possible that she could have told her cherished little boy something different, something easy; that yes, he was all theirs, and yes, he had come from in there.

She looks at him now. ‘I know,' she whispers.

‘What do you mean?'

‘They were here yesterday. They'll be here again today.'

‘Who?'

‘MI5.'

Nick's mouth drops open.

‘I've been put under a Control Order. Technically, you shouldn't be here without permission.'

‘You're under a Control Order? Why? They're for terrorists about to be deported, not for you.' He puts his arms around her. ‘Why didn't you tell me?'

Joan cannot speak. Her body seems to melt with sorrow and she clings to her son, pressing her face into his shoulder so that she doesn't have to look at him when she speaks. ‘I didn't want to bother you.'

Nick sighs, exasperated, but he keeps hold of her, shaking his head and stroking her back as Joan had done so many times for him when he was a boy, and which he now does for his own sons. ‘Oh Mum, what is it with your generation that you all think it's some sort of favour not to bother people?' He stops. ‘I don't understand why you didn't ask for help. It's what I do. It's my job. You must have been so scared.'

Joan nods.

‘Right then.' Nick releases her gently, and takes his BlackBerry out of his coat pocket, as if he intends to sort it all out there and then on that odd little contraption. ‘We need to make a plan. First of all, we need to see evidence. They can't keep you effectively imprisoned here without providing at least a sufficient amount of evidence for you to understand the charges against you. And when they can't provide it'—Nick snorts derisively at this and continues typing on his phone—‘then we'll think about compensation.'

And there it is again: that brief pause in time between one thing and another, in which Joan can only look at Nick and wish with all her heart that this moment might be suspended indefinitely, held in time for ever.

But it cannot. She knows it cannot. There is the sound of a car pulling up outside, doors opening and then slamming shut, smart heels clipping up the path. Bang on time.

Nick starts at the noise. ‘Are they here?' He strides to the window and pulls back the curtain. ‘Is that them?'

‘Please, Nick. Please go.' Joan's voice is perilously loud in her own head. She cannot allow him to stay. She has to protect him from this. ‘You can slip out the back and I won't even have to tell them you were here. I'll call you later once it's all sorted out.'

Nick turns to her and shakes his head. He steps forward and places his hand on Joan's shoulder. ‘Don't be silly, Mum. I'm not going anywhere until that Control Order has been removed and they've promised they're never coming back.'

‘But aren't you expected in court today?'

‘I've just emailed Chambers now. They'll send one of the juniors to cover for me.'

‘Please, Nick,' Joan whispers, her voice suddenly unsteady. ‘Please go. I'll be fine.'

‘No.'

 

What a bad sign it is to get the
Cambridge Book of Romantic Verse
out of the college library. Joan sneaks it up to her room, hiding it under her physics textbook, so that she can read it in bed after cocoa, the only time when she feels it is acceptable to spend a little time wallowing. She has seen Leo a few times since the incident with the bicycle, but each of these times has been casual and unplanned so she has taken to dressing more carefully for science practicals than is strictly appropriate and keeping her powder compact in the breast pocket of her lab coat, just in case. He tends to drop in when he has finished his work for the day, which could be at any time from lunchtime onwards, and on each occasion Joan has found herself rushing to finish so that she might walk home with him and listen to his most recent thoughts on planned economies while also observing the smoothness of the skin around his eyes and the perfect, almost unnatural, definition of his lips.

He tells her: ‘It's not that Stalin wants to
control
the economy. The nuances are all wrong. A better translation is that the economy is being
steered
.'

And: ‘The stakes are too high in the USSR for anything to go wrong. There's no room for trial and error. Poor countries can only bet on certainties.'

And: ‘Variety is a luxury for the rich. To provide an abundance of one thing for one set of people while at the same time failing to provide sufficient food and warmth for others is a gross miscalculation of planning.'

And: ‘An unplanned economy is a slow, inefficient system. No individual acting alone can reap enough reward to justify the risks of expansion. Yes, it happens. But not often. And not quickly enough to make the leap from feudalism to industrialisation in one generation.'

His manner on these occasions is intense, deliberate, and it is this quality that convinces Joan that Leo Galich is by far the most intelligent man she has ever met.

The poems are silly, she knows that. She has never been one for poetry. She considers that there is something unsatisfactory about it, and finds herself wondering why hopeless love must always be rendered in rhyme. In her opinion, there is more romance in science than in poetry—in knowing that bodies will always move towards each other in space, in the relentless certainty of pi and in the possibility of iterating algorithms in daisy petals—than there is in all the love poetry in that heavy, dark-brown book which she will keep under her bed until it must be returned to the library. But still, she is a student. She is eighteen years old. The poetry is inevitable.

She does not mention these talks with Leo to Sonya. It is not that she intends to be secretive but she is not yet ready to share them with anyone who might be able to see how much she enjoys listening to him. She can imagine Sonya's expression if she were to let on, the sharp burst of laughter which would accompany any confession of this nature. These moments are too delicate, too precious, to withstand such an onslaught. Besides this, she could not bear the thought that Sonya might tell Leo, and that the two of them would laugh about it together, maybe even with the blonde girl in the pillbox hat whom Leo has never mentioned and whom Joan hasn't seen since the films, but who occasionally appears in Joan's dreams as a pretty yet menacing presence.

Today Leo is waiting outside the science faculty when she comes out of morning lectures. ‘I was wondering if you were free for lunch?' he asks, holding up a small shopping bag to indicate that he has brought food with him.

Joan smiles, not wanting to appear overly delighted at the prospect, but at the same time flattered by the trouble he must have gone to. ‘I'd love to,' she says and then pauses, glancing back at the science faculty. ‘I've got to be back by two though. We've got practicals this afternoon.'

He nods. ‘Plenty of time.' He turns around and starts to walk, and then looks back. ‘Come on. There's something I'd like you to see.'

They walk together through Market Square and then along Rose Crescent to Trinity Street. This side of town is unfamiliar to her, being home to the older, men-only colleges which Joan is only permitted to enter in the company of a man. They are grander and less welcoming than Newnham, but Leo does not allow her to linger. He marches her past the bookshop and the post office, and steers her through the gatehouse of St. John's at the end of the street, gesturing that she should wait outside the Porters' Lodge while he goes in to collect a large, iron key. He reappears after a few seconds, and leads her to a small door at the bottom of the chapel tower in the far corner of the cobbled courtyard. The key slots easily into the keyhole, turning the lock with a clunk, and Leo pushes the door open. ‘You first,' he says.